XAUTHORITY environment value is not a clean path

I am having trouble opening VS Code from my VM running on Ubuntu 16.04. When I try to open it from the terminal, I get the error: > WARNING: XAUTHORITY environment value is not a clean path: "/some/path/.Xauthority" cannot open path of the current working directory: Permission denied I don't know much about what .Xauthority is, so unfortunately that is about all the information I can provide. The path seems legitimate, but if someone could help me out, that would be great.